1. Technical Field
Example embodiments of the present invention relate to a technique for a packet transmission method, and more specifically to methods and apparatuses for controlling packet transmissions in consideration of characteristics of applications, which can reduce energy consumption of a mobile terminal.
2. Related Art
Recently, mobile devices such as a smart phone, etc. have become popular to users due to their convenience of use, high hardware specification and mobility. Various services utilizing such the mobile devices are appearing. Especially, among the various services, services such as a Social Networking Service (SNS), a Location Based Service (LBS), etc., which focused upon mobility and service continuity of the mobile devices, have been to the fore.
Since such the services are provided in online form according to their characteristics, connectivity to internet should be maintained in order to for them to be utilized. Most of applications demanding online connections have different internet access patterns, and they consume much energy by always maintaining their communication module responsible for data transmission and reception in activated state. Accordingly, such the energy consumption makes it difficult that mobile devices having limited battery power provide connectivity services smoothly.
Meanwhile, there exist various communication protocols such as IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi), WCDMA (3G), WiMax/LTE/LTE-A (4G), etc. which can provide internet access services. Also, the protocols like them have a similar power model according to transmission patterns of application using them.
Also, most of communication protocols have an active mode (AM) and a sleep mode (SM) to implement power saving mechanism. Even though different protocols have different energy consumption ratio for the active mode and the sleep mode, the sleep mode usually consumes about one fifths of power consumed in the active mode. The conventional technologies use schemes in which their signaling or packet scheduling mechanism is modified, thereby making a time duration staying in the sleep mode longer and a time staying in the active mode shorter in order to optimized energy efficiency.
However, since protocols are usually dependent on hardware in which the protocols are performed, it is not easy to modify various protocols for various mobile devices. Also, metrics such as properties of applications and user preferences, which can be accessed only in application layer, cannot be utilized by modifying protocols such as signaling and packet scheduling. Therefore, there are problems that properties of applications and user preferences are not applied to energy efficiency optimization.